15 years after his secret detention in China, Ai Weiwei is voluntarily returning to confinement. Not as a prisoner, but as the central figure in a live performance that transforms one of the darkest moments of his life into an invitation to reflect on surveillance, memory, and political power. Staged between July 3 and 4 at Manchester’s Aviva Studios, Sewing A Button sees Ai spend 24 hours inside a full-scale reconstruction of the cell where he was secretly detained for 81 days in 2011. The rec
